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Control-related categories of arXiv

The CSS journals - IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and IEEE Control Systems Magazine - are leading sources of information for control systems professionals worldwide. The value that our editorial boards add in terms of peer review is probably at an all-time high.

Nevertheless, the World Wide Web and the Internet have facilitated the growth of radically new ways of disseminating knowledge. To this end, the IEEE Control Systems Society has taken steps to help its members to take advantage of e-print publications on arXiv.

In 1991 physicist Paul Ginsparg created the arXiv internet database (it can be found here) for physicists interested in making their preprints available to all. Since then, this database has significantly grown to the point of representing the primary means of communication for physicists and mathematicians today. ArXiv allows anyone interested to circulate his/her own research preprints of submitted/published work. On the other hand, any paper written by other researchers can be retrieved in various formats (postscript, pdf, and latex source among others).

The possibility of cross-referencing papers with other groups (such as physics, computer science, and nonlinear sciences) is particularly interesting for the control community. Because of the large number of researchers and the increasing number of monthly submissions to many journals in the control area, the submission-to-publication time may be quite long. On one hand, having a tool for making preprints available on-line is useful for researchers interested in sharing their work with the scientific community before it has been accepted for publication: this is a much faster way to "close the loop" between submission and diffusion of research results. On the other hand, the availability of a large database where preprints as well as published papers by other researchers can be retrieved provides an invaluable source of information, the potential of which cannot be overstated. Ideally, at a given time, each researcher may use this tool to know what all the other people in the field are working on. Of course, in order to reach this ideal condition everyone should, at the same time, submit his/her own works to the database. This is what is already happening today in the physics community.

A “Systems and Control” section (cs.SY) of the Computing Research Repository (CoRR) of the arXiv has been created in 2010 by Roberto Tempo. This section complements an earlier “Optimization and Control” section (math.OC) under the Math Repository of the arXiv, which was established in 1999 by Eduardo Sontag. Synergies between the two categories are emphasized and cross-links between cs.SY and math.OC are often added.